Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Money was moved from capital to current expenditure and from one Department to another. It is done throughout the course of the year and that is exactly what we have done on this occasion. As I said yesterday, this is not an issue of taxpayers' money being wasted. This money has not even been spent yet. The issue is a serious underestimate in the cost of building the project and we accept responsibility for that. The mistake was made by our agents. We signed off on it, we accept responsibility for it, and we will deal with it and build this project. It will be open to our children in 2022 and 2023.

I have heard many comparisons over the past couple of days with other projects in the past such as the Dublin Port tunnel, the original Luas line and the personal, payroll and related systems, PPARS, which overran considerably. It has been compared to other projects including Metro North, the Thornton Hall prison site, the "Bertie bowl" and e-voting, which all cost a lot of money but were rashly abandoned and never concluded. It is telling that people use those comparisons precisely because every single one of them is more than ten years ago and occurred under previous Governments. Overruns in capital projects used to be the norm ten or 20 years ago. They are not the norm anymore.

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